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As is our mandate, the above picks tend towards the unsettling. It’s understandable if horror and post-apocalypse is too visceral in our present moment, but it’s worth engaging with books outside your comfort zone as there is often a transformative power in doing so.

Reactionary racist pushback against representation in the arts is especially heightened at the moment, but it should be noted that obviously this is an ongoing phenomenon and not new or isolated.

This month is Black History Month and an especially important moment to recognize and showcase Black authors – those currently producing fiction as well as the creators of genre-defining works.

I’m all for undirected escapism through books, but it’s also important to maintain intention in what we seek out to read.

Unsurprisingly, during trying times I find reading to be helpful: both through absorbing information at a slower pace and temporarily transporting me to another reality.

It’s often very difficult these days to read anything but the news as we find ourselves living through this drawn-out dystopian nightmare.

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler (1993) is the classic and influential near-future novel of climate change-induced societal collapse, bleak but tentatively hopeful.

Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor (2014) is a sci-fi epic set in Nigeria that blends alien visitation with folklore and mythology, an example of the genre that Okorafor herself coined and theorized: Africanfuturism.

The Good House by Tananarive Due (2003) takes the trappings of Southern Gothic to a haunted house in Washington, exploring intergenerationality through supernatural curses and gifts.

We have these titles and many others in our catalogue. Visit www.exmortisbooks.com

Leonora Carrington's surrealist novel The Hearing Trumpet, featuring a protagonist institutionalized by her family. Carrington herself was detained in an asylum and shortly afterwards escaped from an attempt by her parents to commit her to another institution.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's classic The Yellow Wallpaper, written in defiance of and as a rebuttal to the deprivation and confinement of a "rest cure" prescribed (by men) for (women's) depression which stipulated that she should refrain from writing.